Peter and Hermione were both so weak from loss of blood that I thought they would die. It took all our fragments of medical knowledge, and my discovery of a surgery nearby, to save their lives. Neither was able to move for the next week, which infuriated Peter, and which was treated by Hermione as just one more damned slap from the world. Kiera herself could, at first, place no weight on the ankle that Gaki had grasped, but after a few days she began to get its use back. I think it was a result of Gaki’s grip rather than the Macathar’s power. The upshot of all this was that I had to do the running around for a while.
I got us ensconced in the nearest house and I searched for such food as the Vermin had not taken. I buried Shon, too. I found a hand cart and I dragged him to the Academy, where there was a green open space for him. It would be a good place for him to lie, a single corpse in the city’s heart turning the place from a cenotaph to a huge and majestic tomb for a criminal lawyer. Perhaps in future ages, if there are future ages, some archaeologist will disinter his bones and judge him a king of times past, to have been buried so.
I buried him before the Grand Memorial, which became his headstone. Digging a hole of the requisite proportions and then filling it in was surprisingly hard and lengthy work. At the end of it I wanted to say a few words, just for my own peace of mind. I wanted to say that he was a friend, that he had died in a good cause, he had lived a full life, all of those platitudes. In the end I said nothing. I knew what he was, and he knew what he was, and God, if He yet lives and cares, knows what he was.
That got me thinking about posterity, or lack of same.
Hermione, not really trusted by or trusting us, hauled herself off to a room of her own as soon as she was able, leaving Peter and Kiera alone together to further their acquaintance. I was aware of the fact as one might be of a constant, mild toothache.
I saw several Macathars, and could still not comprehend what they were doing. I wondered if they even linked the structures with my almost-vanished kind. They paid me no heed and I was never sure enough of them not to stay still or take cover when they strode into view.
When we had enough food stockpiled to last two weeks, I declared, “I am going to the Authority chambers.”
Peter raised his eyebrows. He and Kiera were playing chess with a beautifully moulded set I had found. Kiera kept winning; she cheated better than he did.
“The Governor of the Island has a mirror that he can use to talk to the President,” I said. “I have seen it myself. I’m going to talk to him.”
“If you think that you owe him anything,” Kiera said.
“They need to know what has happened here,” I decided. “Besides, I thought we were all still planning to go back. It will change the tone of our welcome if we come back as witnesses and survivors, rather than escaped prisoners and a deserting Warden.”
“I suppose there’s not much left in Shadrapar for us,” she agreed. Peter was staring at the chessboard. While Kiera was talking to me he reached out to subtly reposition one of her pieces and she told him to stop it.
“Does anyone want a souvenir of the presidency?” I enquired. “For that matter, if I find the chain and the coronet, does anyone want to be the president? We can declare ourselves the new Authority.”
“On balance, I think politics has done enough harm for one lifetime,” Kiera decided.
*
The only part of the Authority buildings I was familiar with was the part near the docks, where they kept prisoners. Everyone knew where the Authority met, though, and where the president had his offices. I was gambling that the mirror was an official tool of office rather than a private toy of Harweg himself.
The doors to the Authority chambers were wide open. Strangely, it made the place feel more occupied, rather than less. One could imagine an official bustling out at any moment, three books clamped under his arm.
As I came to the door I flushed out two Vermin that darted out under my very nose. One had been wearing a councilman’s robe in great, ill-fitting folds. The other had been clutching a musket, which was an ugly trend. Whether or not they were brute animals incapable of thought, I reckoned they could work out how to pull a trigger.
The last moments of the Authority were spread through the corridors of power like a discarded fashion show, but the attentions of the Vermin had muddied their deciphering. The doors were mostly open and few of the clothes strewn about were in the rooms themselves. The passages were thronged with them. Had someone raised an alarm? Had they known the Weapon was about to fire? Why run, then? Where could you reach, in that blink of time?
I found signs of fighting, too. Musket balls had scarred the walls and there were the canvas clothes of Outriders here and there. Whether they had fallen in combat or just vanished with everyone else was impossible to say. I found Angel armour too. I stooped to take a shielding pack, strapping the unaccustomed weight to my back. If I could make it work it might be useful.
I found the president’s office eventually, and the door, alone of all the doors I had seen, was closed.
It would not open for me, so I found the nearest window and checked the distance. It would be a shuffle of five feet before I reached a window into the president’s office. The building was not built with serious burglar-prevention in mind, and I had served my time in the trade when I ran with the Friendly Society.
I knocked in the window with an economy of motion and it occurred to me, as I squirmed my way into the room, that in some small way I had become a man of action.
There was no president, alive or dead. I had been toying with the odd idea that this office might have been protected from the Weapon somehow; that I would find a starved and half-crazed Harweg. Instead I found, as I had joked, the coronet and the chain of office. They were strewn across the big desk, amidst random books and scribbled jottings. There were no clothes.
I was faced with the bizarre idea that either he had been elsewhere at the end, or Harweg had been in his office completely nude save for the regalia of power. I preferred the latter.
I spent too long looking for the mirror because I assumed that it would be in plain view and identical to the one on the Island. Eventually I triggered a catch which opened a panel in one of the walls, and there was a silvered oval of glass and a few brass buttons.
There was also a light that was glowing on and off, on and off, with the patience of the damned. The sight made me uneasy. I did not like the idea of this hidden mechanism calmly sending out its message for hours or days or weeks, behind its little panel door.
I touched a button, and the silver mists of the mirror parted. I stared into the dimness and recognised the gloomy confines of the Governor’s quarters. Of course, there was nobody within view. I had not considered the possibility that Leontes de Margot, Governor of the Island, would not be waiting at my beck and call.
“Hello?” I called, feeling foolish. Perhaps I had to push other buttons for my voice to come out of the Governor’s mirror. I really had no idea. “Anybody there?”
A face came into view without warning and from an unexpected direction. It was Thelwel’s face, and not the Governor’s. He was oddly slanted: while the wall behind him was straight, he seemed to have chosen to lean into the mirror at a thirty degree angle. I assumed it was some strange joke on his part.
The surprise he exhibited on seeing me was exactly mirrored by my surprise on seeing him.
“Stefan?”
“Thelwel?”
“What are you doing there?” we chorused.
There was a pause as each of us waited for the other to speak.
“Thelwel,” I said at last. “I need to give you some news. I need to give everyone there some news? Where is the— Is the Marshal dead?”
“Yes,” Thelwel confirmed solemnly. “The day after you left. Some people said it was the news of your leaving that killed him.”
I did not know how I felt about that. Still, I pressed on. “And the Governor? Can you get him?”
Thelwel looked at me with huge eyes. “He’s dead, Stefan,” was all he said.
“He’s dead too?” I frowned. It did not seem reasonable.
“He took his own life, Stefan.”
“Thelwel, are you playing some elaborate practical joke on me? Are you drunk? Why are you leaning at that ridiculous angle anyway?”
“I… I’m not, Stefan. I’m not leaning. I’m standing quite straight.” He left a careful pause at the end of the sentence.
At the end of that pause I said, “Oh,” as the implications fit into place. “Tell me everything.”
He shrugged. “There’s not much I can tell. After the Marshal died things held for about a day – some stretches were controlled by prisoners, like ours. Some were still locked up. Then fighting started. Wardens started shooting up whole stretches. Prisoners got up to the fourth floor. Wardens started letting people loose and Wardens started fighting Wardens. Everyone knew the boat was wrecked. Everyone knew we’d been abandoned. It all broke, Stefan.” He shivered. “A bunch of Wardens turned up above us and started shooting through the ceiling. I was shot. It took me a while to put myself back together. Lucian was shot, Stefan. I’m sorry.”
I said I was sorry, too.
“By the time I was on my feet it was mostly over. There were maybe four different groups – prisoners, Wardens, one with both, holding to different parts, and the machinery was broken. Nobody says if it got damaged in the fighting or someone did it deliberately, but the big pumps are failing and I can’t fix them.” That seemed to distress him more than the deaths.
“So what now?” I asked him.
“Some few took boats for the city. Maybe you’ll see them, or maybe the river will take them. More have lit out for the jungle, and most likely the jungle will take them. But of the rest… I went to the group that held the fourth floor. They were Wardens and prisoners – a lot of the women prisoners too, the ones the Witch Queen had left alive. I told them I could show them how to live in the swamps, if they followed me. I showed them what I am, Stefan, and that they couldn’t kill me. I made myself their leader.” His voice shook. I couldn’t imagine my mild friend from the cells doing any of these things. “We are all that’s left in the Island now. And so I call on the Authority of Shadrapar. But instead I get you, Stefan.”
I dodged the implicit question. “How many are with you?”
“Eighty-seven men, twenty-four women.” He blinked. “All the women have guns.”
I sat back and thought about how many people had been on the Island when I left it. But then I thought about how many people had been in Shadrapar when I left there, and Thelwel’s news seemed positively good.
Then Thelwel politely expressed his surprise that I appeared to be President-elect in Harweg’s absence, and so I had to tell him. There would be no help from Shadrapar for his little band. At the same time, there would be no punishment, no orders. Whoever was left in control of the Island would face no challenge from that compass point.
We sat and stared at each other for a long time after that, and I swear Thelwel listed slightly further as we did.
“What now, Stefan?” Thelwel asked me at last. “My home is broken and yours is abandoned. What now?”
I thought about that and I had only one answer.
*
My life is strung on a serious of fortuitous absences. I was at a party one evening, so I was not there to stand by Helman, Jon and Rosanna when the mob came, and I lived. I was sold to the Angels by Greygori Sanguival, so I was not there when the surface-dwellers descended upon Underworld, and I lived. I was exiled to the Island like a common criminal, so I was not there when some mad and desperate man fired the Weapon, and so I lived. I escaped the Island and returned home, so I was not there when the riots erupted and the massacre happened. I have made my mark on history in a series of Stefan-shaped holes and lived to write this account. At the same time, this is not the account of a reliable witness, only the speculations of a man who was not there.
*
“You want us to do what?” Peter demanded of me. “Finally, you’ve gone crazy.”
I shrugged. “So what else?”
“Go to that nasty old man and throw ourselves on his mercy?”
“So what else?” We were all four of us together. I had gone to get Hermione, who had shambled in and was sitting, separate from the rest of us, watching with extreme suspicion.
“He can’t stand people, I don’t know if you noticed that,” Peter went on. “You think he’s going to be happy to have us four and a hundred Islanders appear with begging bowls?”
“So what else?” I practically shouted at him. He blinked, hurt.
“Just… stay here… I don’t know.”
“I could not stay here,” I told him. “I don’t trust the Macathars not to destroy us absentmindedly, as we would swat flies, because that’s what we are to them. I am going to throw myself on Trethowan’s mercy.”
“Me too,” Kiera agreed, “And so are you, Peter. What is there here? What would we eat, that the Vermin haven’t taken? And they won’t stay afraid of us for long. What will we do, save hide for the rest of our lives?”
“Trethowan won’t go for it,” Peter argued.
“Trethowan will see things have changed,” Kiera pointed out. “If Thelwel keeps the Islanders in line, they can set up away from his precious children. And Trethowan’ll lord it over them anyway, you know him. There are too few of us left to endanger his people and so he’ll get to enjoy treating everyone like a poor relation. Let him, so long as people get fed. I’ll convince him.” And then Hermione was finally out of patience and we had to explain to her what we were talking about, and whilst it was technically a violation of our promise to Trethowan not to do just that, I felt that circumstances had changed enough to render the vow null and void.
“I’m not ready,” Peter said weakly, after that was done. “I can’t travel.”
“We have enough food for now. We have the time to wait for you,” I said. “Besides, I have something to write down.”
And so, while the two of them cheated at chess and recovered their strength; while Hermione, already further along that road, began to go on her own plodding expeditions into the city; while Thelwel ordered his diminished flock, I took what pages I had smuggled out of the Island and I expanded them into this.
I wanted there to be a requiem of sorts, for the human race. I have no idea who may come to ruined Shadrapar to read it. Perhaps the Macathars, or the Vermin, or the distant descendants of the web-children. Perhaps those races from the stars that ancient man was so fond of imagining will finally come down, too late, and discover my words.
*
There is a concept in Trethowan’s writings about a crucial population size, below which a species simply cannot sustain itself, and is destined only for extinction. I do not know if there are enough of us left.
I am finishing now, for all the invalids are well enough to travel, and I am becoming less and less willing to stay in this city. The Silence never went away. I have felt it stalking me. I will not be able to stave off the fear of it for long, and then where might I go? And I have seen Faith again, or my mind is playing more tricks. Am I anchoring her here? Another reason I should go. When I am lonely I yearn for her. I would not trust myself if I met her again.
Yesterday I saw a strange monster in the streets. It was a black, tentacled, armoured thing that moved slowly, as though it had been taken from some other medium entirely. I found myself thinking that perhaps it had come from the poisoned and infinitely dead sea. I have no wish to meet anything from there. I hope I imagined it.
We will go tomorrow. I will leave this account here. It is decided. Perhaps it is Faith I will leave it for. Perhaps this knowledge will allow her to make informed decisions at last and take control of her world.
*
I almost didn’t include this. It is my account, after all. I should have fiat over what goes in, and what details I excise and which are, therefore, lost forever out of this leaking world. But, given what was said, I have decided to be frank and honest, this one time.
I had come back to my account with the intention, perhaps, of adding or subtracting some small adventures. There is so much circumstance I have left out, so much I have put in. But it is a life, my life. Hard to know, from the limits of these eyes, what can be treated as relevant.
Except my account was not lying patiently awaiting its creator. Hermione was there reading it.
I cannot say how long I stopped and stared at her. She seemed as absorbed as a child. A chronicler could not ask for a more intent audience for his words. Peter could not read, of course. Kiera could, but she was rusty and took no particular pleasure in it. I had never even considered that Hermione might possess that ancient and arcane skill.
And yet many of the prisoners could read and write, of course. Outside the elevated social circles I had been used to travel in, many people actually needed to write things down for practical purposes, like tallying stolen goods or sending threatening messages to their fellow criminal literati.
She had been trained to keep stock in a warehouse, she told me. In fact, she pointed out that she had certainly told me exactly that at some point in our shared incarceration, but I had not paid much heed to it.
“I wanted to finish it,” she said. Her face told me nothing, as broad and suspicious as it ever had been. “I could see you were done. I thought you were going to set fire to it or something.”
“Why would I…?”
“The sort of thing you posh people do, isn’t it?” she suggested carelessly.
“No, no it is not, just…” I reached for the pages and she took them between her hands as if to tear the whole manuscript in half, a feat she was certainly capable of. I backed off.
“What do you think, then?” I asked. I had not anticipated literary criticism with the Shadrapan publishing industry in the parlous state it now was, but apparently that was my lot.
“You missed a lot out,” she told me. “What about that time that…” and she referred to some incidents that befell me on the Island that, even being as frank as I am, I have not mentioned. There were countless humiliations and hurts and frustrations in my past, and there were things I did, too: mean and petty things that I am not proud of, enacted because I was powerless and afraid.
She regarded me, as hard to read as the Marshal. “You are a shallow one.”
I gaped at her. I was outraged, though not so openly that she might take offence and hit me.
“Pretty face this and posh education that. You and me, we shared more time and words in the cell than you ever did with those two. And what am I, in here? Ugly and big.” She didn’t seem angry, just sad. She still wasn’t handing over the pages, and it was because she still had something to say. Eventually I came and sat down beside her, just as we had sat in the cell, me in her shadow.
“I’m sorry, I’ll…”
“Don’t,” she told me. “Big and ugly, like the world. Just put in that I tore a strip off you, here and now, and we’re quits. Bad things happened. Don’t have to mention any of it again.”
I was being let off, and at the time I thought it was because we’d saved her life, tended her wounds and fed her as she lay under the weight of the cut Gaki had given her. Or else she was setting it against having leagued herself with Gaki in the first place. Afterwards, I had a more dire thought than that, but I cannot bring myself to satisfy my curiosity.
She talked of Gaki then, who she had known was a frightful man without fearing him. He had treated her better than I, even though she’d known that becoming his companion was no more than a novel method of suicide. “But he got me out. Better days with him than a life in a cell,” she said. “He was interesting.” She missed him, and she knew that she only lived because he was gone, and there was no contradiction in that for her.
I let her finish the few remaining pages and then she shoved the bundle of papers into my chest and ambled off. Only after she’d gone did I think about what else that ‘bad things happened’ might have referred to. She had been a factory worker, after all, at exactly the time that Helman and the rest of us had produced our doomed magnum opus. She was perfectly placed to have been within that crowd, worked up and unleashed upon the subject of her employer’s ire. And she had killed before. Who knew just whose blood was on those big hands?
I have not asked. I will not ask.
*
The most extraordinary thing has happened!
I must expand my account, for this is worthy of record.
The four of us were scavenging some last food, on the very point of leaving, when I found someone.
I was sitting in a square, counting my containers and trying to calculate how many we needed, when I saw movement at a window. I quickly packed everything away in a sack, for the Vermin are much bolder these days and will take food from us if they can. I stood there with a flintlock in my hand, ready to fire it and scare them off.
I saw nothing more, but the Vermin are grown very clever as well. I took up my sack and my gun and I made a quiet progress by a roundabout route to the back door of the building, and slipped in. If there were Vermin tailing me, I wanted to scare them off.
Instead, I found myself creeping up on a woman. She was short, and dressed in hard-wearing clothes that I found more than a little familiar, and when she turned at my step, fumbling for her crossbow, she said, “Hey! I know you! You’re that Strepan something.”
“Stefan Advani,” I corrected her, lowering my pistol. I recognised her. I could put no name to the face but I could see, plain as day, that she was a Fisherman. “What are you doing here?”
“Could ask you the same question. Thought you got deported.”
“So I came back,” I told her. “I heard the Underworld got cleaned out.”
“So we went deep,” she told me. “Then when we came out again, place was like this. What the hell happened?”
I seized on the salient point. “There are more of you?”
“A fair few,” she agreed. “You’re that weird booky friend of Sergei’s, that right?”
“Sergei’s with you?”
“We lost track of him in the fight,” she said. “Pelgraine’s in charge.”
“Pelgraine,” I repeated stupidly. She nodded.
“Now are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asked me.
“Take me to Pelgraine right now,” I replied, and she did.
It was just as she had said. After the battle for Underworld, Pelgraine had led his survivors down into places only the Fishermen knew. They had survived there the best they could, fending off the Stabbers and the Mazen. Eventually, the need for food forced them up, and they discovered the same thing we had. They numbered twenty-seven.
I told them I had a plan, and they were shaken and desperate enough to come with us, so now we were thirty-one and not four, and the human race numbered practically a hundred and forty.
*
When all was ready, I sat up on a rubble mound away from the others and looked out at the city of my birth. Each landmark recalled a face to me – people I’d known back in the day. This low dive might be where Rosanna and I had embraced; that rooftop where Giulia, Sergei and Arves had watched the dawn in with me, one time. Astonishing how a species-wide extinction event can pale before the knives of personal tragedy. And it is that self-centredness, no doubt, that led some great magnate of our city to unleash the Weapon on his rivals.
So it was that, faced with the ghosts of a hundred thousand vanished people, I moped like a bad poet about my own trivial worries.
Kiera came and sat beside me. I did not know how I felt about her then, because she had spent so long alone with Peter while I gathered food and spoke to Thelwel and Pelgraine. Perhaps I felt hard done by. Yes, I am inconstant.
“You’ve been very quiet,” she observed.
I nodded.
“What’s wrong?” she said carefully. “I’d have thought that, what with this friend of yours appearing, you’d have cheered up.”
I looked at her.
“Are you worried about Trethowan?” she pressed. “Now that there are more of us?”
“No,” I said.
“Progress. We have speech,” she remarked acidly. “Talk to me, Stefan. Nothing’s going to get better if you bottle it up.”
“I really do not have anything to say. You don’t need to worry about me.”
She put a hand on my shoulder. “Stefan, I don’t need to worry about anyone. I know Trethowan will take me back. The web-children would lynch him if he didn’t. I choose to worry about you.”
I tried a wry and sardonic smile, such as some of the Academy students had practised to make themselves look romantic. “And Peter?”
“Peter is starting to get on my nerves,” she said, and I had opened a floodgate somewhere because she continued, “I have never seen a man less able to sit still, and for all that time that he couldn’t go out he had a hundred damn things he needed done, and I had to do them all. You did not get the short straw going out to find food. You didn’t have Peter Drachmar complaining all the time about the things he should be doing while he was laid up recuperating. Hermione was better company. And then the moment he’s well enough to walk I’ve not seen him do anything but chat to those Fishermen of yours. And talk about a bad loser! I have never known anyone quite so damned competitive! Every time I beat him at chess – and it was every time – he sulked like a five-year-old.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“Oh I like him,” she admitted. “He’s a great friend and a brave man and all of that.” Then she squinted at me, as though trying to make out the small print. “Seriously, that’s what this is about? I like you too, Stefan. I don’t choose to ignore Peter because of that, or pretend you don’t exist because of him. I’ve spent my whole life casting people aside for stupid reasons. I would far rather like you both, or neither, or however I choose, without limiting my options.” She shrugged. “What can I say? I’m inconstant.”
Something flowered in my shrivelled little soul then. It is always good, even at the end of the world, to find a kindred spirit. In my mean heart of hearts I choose to believe that had Peter only been a more sportsmanlike chess player then things might have gone very differently.
*
I do not think we will survive, as a species. I have especial doubts in view of the amount of radiation that might be burning invisibly about Shadrapar right now. Depending on how the Weapon worked, of course.
There will be the Mazen, of course, who are technically human. They will outlive us, but I cannot envisage that they will have such a long future. They will tear themselves apart.
I have a vision of the world in several centuries’ time. There are no human beings in my vision but there are the web-children who evolved, or were evolved, in our image, and they have prospered. They have made a civilisation that does not rest on energies and weapons. Instead they use the powers of their minds to build and create, and they work together.
Perhaps they are working on a way to save the dying planet or revive the sun. Perhaps they have built a great boat in which to sail the heavens and find another home, just as men may once have done.
Perhaps, too, they have legends of their pre-history, mythic figures of an elder race. That would be a fair reward for us, I think: Trethowan, father of the web-people (for the web-children will have grown by then); Kiera the clever, ambassador between the old masters of the Earth and the new; Hermione the enduring, whose supplicants ask for the strength to survive what they cannot change; the wounded god Midds (who I hope is waiting for us); Pelgraine, searcher of the depths; the terrible death-god Gaki, whose slaying by Peter Drachmar ushered in the new world (I have to allow Peter some credit, after all). And I shall be there, in some form: Lucky Stefan, perhaps, a trickster god always one step ahead of trouble.
Thelwel should have a role, but at the back of my mind I remind myself that Thelwel has not aged a day since he was made, and can repair all but the most grievous injuries. Perhaps in my dream, Thelwel is still there, a living god, not human, but a reminder of the way they, we, looked. Perhaps Faith is with him, too, amongst hearts she need not shield herself from. She and Thelwel would make a good couple, once the rest of us are gone.
I will leave this account in the Temple, beneath the opened sarcophagus of the Coming Man. Let it be theirs who find it.
Let it be yours.